In 1871, Thomas Moran was invited by the director of the United States Geological Survey to join an expedition to what would become Yellowstone National Park (established 1872). The trip began one of the most inspired and productive periods of Moran's life, setting the tradition of American landscape painting on a modern, experimental trajectory.

Moran's majestically spacious Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Wyoming attests to the era’s perception of the western American landscape as a setting for heroic nationalism. At the time when this picture was painted, artists were traveling ever farther in search of ever more extraordinary scenes that could be understood in terms of the national will to explore the nation "from sea to shining sea"; fueled by the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny. Although this landscape is from 1906, it is based on sketches made during his trips to Yellowstone in the 1870s.